A bank is a financial institution often licensed by a government and having primary activities in borrowing and lending. Traditionally, banks have acted as payment agents, maintaining transactional accounts, more commonly know as deposit or credit accounts, for customers. Customers have traditionally handled various business transactions in person at a branch of the bank. At these bank branch locations, transactions, including offers and acceptances, are traditionally recorded on paper and stored at the branch location by a human clerk or bank teller. Similarly, pre-approved offers for credit cards or other transaction mediums are distributed and accepted through paper records that are generally handled by mail services. Unfortunately, the process of maintaining and auditing the paper records is time-consuming, expensive, and not feasible to audit on a long term basis.
Over the course of the past two decades, the bank industry has come to rely heavily on electronic transactions. One of the most heavily used avenues for conducting electronic transactions is the automatic teller machine (“ATM”). An ATM is a computerized telecommunications device that provides the customers of a financial institution with access to financial transactions in a public space, without the need for a human clerk or bank teller. An ATM can handle nearly any function that a traditional bank teller can handle, but the ATM must ensure that each transaction is authorized and each customer identified in order to ensure that someone else has not accepted the transaction on the customer's behalf. On most modern ATMs, the customer is identified by inserting a plastic ATM card with a magnetic strip or a plastic smartcard with a chip. The ATM card or smartcard contain a unique card identifier and some security information, which can include expiration data or a card security code. Similarly, each transaction is authorized with the use of a personal identification number (“PIN”).
A quick service terminal (QST) is similar to an ATM, but it is found within a bank branch. The QST is deployed in the teller lines in many banks. The QST is similar to the ATM in many functional aspects, but the QST retains an authorization method that includes the digital capture of customer signatures. In this regard, the QST is outfitted with a digital signature pad. The digital signature pad, in turn, is outfitted with a screen and digital pen. The user may authorize transactions by using the digital pen to sign his or her name to the screen. Alternatively, the digital signature pad can retain a keypad, wherein each key corresponds to a numerical value. This configuration can allow a user to either enter a personal identification number (PIN) into the signature pad in order to authorize a transaction or simply create a digital signature with the use of the digital signature pad. The QST can then digitally retain the signature for verification purposes.
Despite the incredibly varied functionality of an ATM or QST used in conjunction with a card reader or digital signature pad, a bank teller and paper records are still required for many types of transactions, including pre-approved credit offers.